Redemptive Zeal and Messianism

Redemptive Zeal and Messianism is the book's contested idea that a promised spiritual or national future can justify present sacrifice. Its force lies in the clash between hope and accusation: Michel Sommo speaks as a man who once expected Israel to realize brotherhood and redemption, while Alexander Gideon warns that the pursuit of salvation can become hostility to life itself. Ilana's memories of pioneer songs offer a third register, in which the promised land is both a lost ideal and a longing that can be answered only through care for the living.

The Promise and Its Discontents

Michel's appeal to Gideon gives the redemptive ideal a political and personal history. He recalls arriving in Israel from the Sorbonne with faith that the people there would become brothers and that the Messiah would rule. Instead, his life in the country has included work as a builder, night watchman, cinema ticket seller, and regimental policeman. He presents these occupations not as proof that labor is beneath him, but as evidence of the distance between his hope of belonging and his experience of social rank.

His accusation makes that distance a matter of national power. In his account, Gideon and people like him possess property, influence, judgment, and public standing, while ordinary Jews are treated as subordinate. Michel describes the work of building the country as labor performed by people who are denied equal dignity and left to inhabit what the powerful have discarded. This is his partisan indictment, not an impartial description of the society; its importance is that it recasts the national project as a promise whose benefits and burdens are unequally shared.

The dispute becomes sharper when Michel condemns Gideon's book for presenting Israel unfavorably to a wider audience. He says he has not read it, relying instead on an evening-paper account that characterized it as a Zionist obsession. His denunciation links private resentment to the fear of public disgrace: Gideon's criticism appears to Michel not as detached writing but as an injury to the country and a betrayal of the redemptive undertaking in which Michel once believed.

From Redemption to Accusation

Michel's language turns the political dispute into a judgment on Gideon's right to act as a father. He recalls that he had initially welcomed the chance to shelter and teach Gideon's son, imagining that he could repay harm with good and save a soul. He now calls that confidence foolish and asks for the girl to be returned, insisting that Gideon has no right over her. The reversal exposes the instability of his benevolent intention: an act imagined as generous incorporation has become part of a custody conflict, and the language of moral repair now accompanies a demand for separation.

His appeal also borrows the vocabulary of judgment. Michel imagines a time when Gideon and his kind will confess, repent, and return to serving the country rather than enlarging private property. He declares that Gideon's time is over and invokes the tolling bells after midnight on a Friday in South Jerusalem as a sign that power has passed to a supposedly better neighbor. The political succession is expressed as sacred verdict: the present order is not merely challenged but treated as already condemned by a higher moral timetable.

Yet Michel does not present himself as innocent. He acknowledges his own possible sin in marrying a woman he believes was destined for someone superior, and says that Gideon's shadow remained over the marriage. He writes under the influence of brandy and tranquilizers, notices an old newspaper photograph of Gideon in uniform, and plans to walk to the Western Wall for midnight prayers. His closing resolve to devote himself to redeeming the land preserves the very ideal that his letter has made bitter. Redemption remains his chosen task, but it is now also a means of imagining eventual vindication against those he believes have humiliated him.

Gideon's Critique of Salvation

Gideon's later reflections shift the emphasis from exclusion to the danger of making salvation superior to life. He describes his recurring habit of turning even an ordinary encounter with a bee into a theological question, only to destroy the question and generate another. That pattern becomes a model for his intellectual struggle: for nine years he has wrestled with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx while trying to refute the idea that selfishness, baseness, or cruelty alone explains humanity's self-destruction.

His counterargument is that people can destroy themselves precisely through their highest longings: the need to be saved and the obsession with redemption. He calls this a theological disease and associates it with a diminished talent for living. The distinction is not between religion and irreligion so much as between life as it is experienced and a supposedly superior future used to make the loss of life acceptable. A promised land becomes dangerous when it is treated as a reality worth reaching by eradicating other people or sacrificing the present to an imagined deliverance.

To show how sacred expectation can authorize violence, Gideon invokes a story of two monks in fourteenth-century Uppsala who killed ninety-eight orphans and then themselves after interpreting a blue fox at their window as a sign from the Virgin. He sets this beside local messianic and poetic imagery in which mass death is figured as preparation for a savior or a concealed glory. The examples are part of his argument, not a neutral history of all faith: they reveal his fear that violence can be made to appear holy when it is narrated as the necessary birth of redemption. Against that abstraction, he points to Michel's daughter as the only glory that matters, and warns that the pursuit of messianic meaning threatens the vulnerable people it claims to serve.

The Promised Land as Memory and Care

Ilana's recollection of pioneer songs complicates both Michel's political indictment and Gideon's rejection of redemptive obsession. As a child of immigrants, she was moved by songs such as In the Land the Fathers Loved, There Was a Lass in Kinneret, and Upon a Hill. They stirred a private longing and seemed to promise that a land existed which the people had not yet found. In retrospect, the songs carry grief: something precious has been destroyed, and the search for the promised country has led into confusion and darkness rather than fulfillment.

Her appeal asks that prayers remember several people, including Michel, his son, his father, Yifat, and Ilana's sister. She names loneliness, desire, and longing as burdens that can extinguish people, while also affirming that they tried to give and receive love. Then she withdraws the request for prayer. Instead, she asks Michel to build a toy-brick tower with Yifat, take her to the zoo and the cinema, make her food, and remember winter pajamas and new shoes. The shift is decisive: the promised future is not dismissed, but the demand for redemption is measured against concrete responsibilities that cannot be postponed.

The Theme's Moral Tension

Across these voices, messianism is neither a simple object of belief nor merely a political slogan. Michel's hope for a redeemed country survives even as he condemns the people he sees as controlling it; Gideon fears that the same hope can turn sacrifice into virtue and violence into sacred necessity. Ilana's remembered songs keep the longing alive while her instructions about Yifat give it a practical test. The tension is between a future invoked to justify present injury and a form of hope that remains answerable to actual people.

The recurring question is therefore not only where the promised land is, but what happens to those living while it is awaited. Michel imagines eventual repentance and the redemption of the country; Gideon sees the promise of salvation as a possible mask for an incapacity to live; Ilana turns from prayer toward attention, food, clothing, play, and companionship. Together, these perspectives make redemptive zeal a source of both moral aspiration and danger, and set ordinary care against any vision of holiness that requires the living to be sacrificed to an unreachable future.